The GOP’s Looming Gay Crisis

As the trend of growing support for gay marriage and gay rights in general accelerates, it is interesting to watch the Christofascists double down on their increasingly hysterical anti-gay rhetoric.  This week the American Academy of Pediatrics endorsed gay marriage and the hate merchants at Focus on the Family were apoplectic.  Glenn Stanton, one of the top anti-gay extremists at FOTF penned a diatribe on FOTF's faux news site, CitizenLink trying to stem the tide against FOTF's religious based bigotry:

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has issued what appears to be a politically motivated statement suggesting that children raised by same-sex parents do just fine. In fact, the AAP goes so far as to suggest that children are more affected by the health of the relationship between the people raising them than by whether they are being raised by their own mother and father.  Sadly, the report is not rooted in social science but instead in a spirit of radical social activism, causing the authors to come to a fantastical and wishful conclusion. 

To be clear, this recent announcement is not science, but propaganda rooted in social activism regarding the family, which is the foundational unit of humanity. That such a credentialed and well-known organization would play politics with this issue should grieve all of those who are committed to the integrity of science when it comes to the future of our children.

It is laughable to see FOTF worrying about science and legitimate medical and mental health knowledge when it regular promotes quacks and charlatans (e.g., Stanton himself) as legitimate experts.   How does this tie in with the GOP?  Here in Virginia the leading puppeteer for the  Virginia GOP is The Family Foundation, FOTF's viciously anti-gay affiliate.  No Republican candidate can hold even moderate positions on gay rights without earning the wrath of TFF.  The same holds true at the national level where Christofascists still control the GOP's positions on so-called social issues.  The nation - and even Virginia - is changing on gay rights and gay marriage, but the Christofascists refuse to allow any change in the GOP.  The result will be that just as the Christofascists are driving younger generations from Christianity, so too they are driving voters from the GOP.  Andrew Sullivan looks at the phenomenon:

In the latest polling, 81 percent of those under 30 favored marriage equality. I was shocked by the number, but shouldn’t have been. What we can all forget is that this is the first generation who went through their childhood and teens knowing that civil marriage was an option for gay couples. That generation included gay kids and teens who, for the first time, could see an integrated future for themselves in their own families and society. I have no doubt this has made that generation the least fucked-up, sanest gay generation in history – seeing from the get-go a real and equal and dignified future for themsleves. And their greater self-confidence and self-esteem has been infectious. Their straight peers know them and their orientation and simply find it baffling that they would be denied what every heterosexual has always accepted as a given in their own lives.

That can only mean that, for the young generation, and all those who follow it in the future, the GOP’s aggressive stance and brutal rhetoric against marriage equality simply identifies them as bigots. Some may not be. But that is what they will be seen to be. The report does not advocate changing policy on marriage equality. But I think the premise that it [the GOP] can win the next generation simply by ignoring the question is untenable.

The over-60, predominantly white, Fox News watching, fundamentalist base cannot budge an inch on gays. Because it’s a religious and not a political position. And so it may soon be a truly fateful day for the GOP: drop the anti-gay policies or become the even angrier old white man party.

If I were Karl Rove, I’d be praying for Anthony Kennedy to write the gay Loving vs Virginia. It would take the issue off the political table for good, and leave them a nice juicy judicial tyranny argument instead. But a mixed verdict  . . .  would keep the issue alive, violate no federalist principles, and leave the GOP’s fundamentalist intransigence in place – as a dead weight around their necks as they try to stay afloat.

Watching ideologues confront reality is always entertaining for a real conservative. But it’s going to be excruciating for today’s Republicans.

I would love to see  a gay  marriage equivalent to Loving v. Virginia.  If that doesn't happen, I hope the GOP's continued prostitution of itself to the Christofascists hastens the party's death as a national party.